<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>The opposite of loneliness by Mymlen</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28648758">The opposite of loneliness</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mymlen/pseuds/Mymlen'>Mymlen</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Venom (Movie 2018)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(sort of), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon divergence – Anne doesn’t know venom survived, Character Study, One Shot, Other, POV Outsider, Post-Canon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 13:33:58</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,522</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28648758</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mymlen/pseuds/Mymlen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Anne knows Eddie thrives on chaos, but she didn’t expect him to come out of those weeks of life-threatening battles with evil corporations and extraterrestrial life forms and actually seem better than he had been before. He comes over weekly for dinner at her and Dan's, and she tries to figure out whether he is actually okay, or if he is about to fall apart again.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Eddie Brock/Venom Symbiote</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>198</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The opposite of loneliness</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Things have been good between her and Eddie lately. They’ve been surprisingly good between Eddie and Dan too, which is something she wouldn’t have dared hope for just a couple of months ago, but now it feels almost inevitable. She supposes that’s one good thing to come out of that whole… alien debacle. Maybe not the only good thing either. She has always known that Eddie needs drama in his life the way other people need sleep or oxygen. It’s part of why they would never have made it in the long run even if things hadn’t ended the way they did – he seems to thrive on the kind of chaos that everyone else, any sane, normal person, should find exhausting. It’s probably not healthy, that he is so utterly unable to be content within any sort of predictable routine, but she had already given up on him getting over it or growing out of it, even before they broke up. Still, even knowing that, she didn’t expect him to come out of those weeks of life-threatening battles with evil corporations and extraterrestrial life forms and actually seem… better than he had been before. The drive to stir up as much mess as he can is still there, he is fighting tooth and nail to get The Brock Report picked up again, but he seems less restless. Like tonight, when he came over for dinner and actually seemed perfectly happy to small talk, to listen to her and Dan talk about their jobs even though nothing scandalous or outrageous has happened at either of them.</p><p>Of course, “better” in Eddie’s case is still a long shot from… well-adjusted. He comes over for dinner almost every week, and he usually stays the night, sleeping on the couch in the living room. It was Dan who offered the first time, because Eddie had seemed reluctant to go and she was too tired to stay awake much longer, and she will never stop being amazed by the sheer bullheaded kindness of that man. Eddie had been too embarrassed to accept, but Dan is immune to embarrassment too, so he insisted, and then went to make up the couch without waiting for an answer. By now it has become part of the unspoken routine of their weeknight dinners. Eddie is usually still asleep when she and Dan leave for work in the morning, and gone when they come back, his blanket folded on the couch and a note for them on the kitchen table, thanking them for dinner but not for letting him stay.</p><p>She has talked to Dan about it, promising him it would only be a temporary thing, feeling the need to apologize that he has had to make room for her ex-boyfriend in their life, when it would have been so perfectly reasonable for him to object. And he said, with a shrug, like he hadn’t even considered it an inconvenience, that Eddie seems lonely, and it’s probably good for him to not wake up in his own, empty apartment every day.</p><p>She has tried to look for signs of loneliness in Eddie since. He doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends, but then he never did. He knows a lot of people but they’re all – they’re the homeless people near his apartment, the lady who owns the convenience store next door, his favorite cashier at the supermarket. She knows he had friends in college, but she hasn’t heard him mention any of their names in years, and his relationship to his coworkers, when he has them, has always seemed antagonistic at best. When her and Eddie were dating, she seemed to be the only person in the world that he was close to, and she remembers thinking that he <em>did</em> seem lonely then. Not when they were together, she got the impression he could be perfectly happy only talking to her for the rest of his life (it had been exhilarating and then exhausting), but she did have other friends, other people, things in her life she wanted to spend time on beside just her work and him, and when he couldn’t see her, even if it was just for a day or two, he would either work himself to the brink of collapse, or slip from moping to apathy to depression in a matter of days. That doesn’t seem to be happening now. He is always wearing clean clothes, always recently showered and reasonably recently shaved when he comes over. She has even been by his apartment a couple of times, once unannounced, and it was perfectly habitable too. Not exactly <em>neat</em>, but by Eddie’s standards, fine. She has wondered whether he is seeing someone and just hasn’t wanted to mention her, but it doesn’t seem likely. If it was anything serious, serious enough to keep him functional on a day-to-day basis, he would have mentioned it, would probably have either brought her along or dropped the dinners altogether.</p><p> </p><p>And then one night, after their dinner, she comes downstairs to get a glass of water. She has had trouble falling asleep recently, she is working a new case at work where everything keeps going wrong, and she finds that getting up and walking around a bit works better to turn her mind off than just lying there and waiting for sleep to come. She is halfway down the stairs when she hears quiet voices from the living room.</p><p>“-a good time. I don’t want to make it weird,” says Eddie in a low murmur, almost too quiet for her to make out the words.</p><p>She tiptoes down the last few steps, holds her breath and feels a twinge of guilt in her gut at deliberately eavesdropping on him like this. And then she gets close enough to peek through the open doorway into the living room, and the guilt is swept away by terror, her stomach drops and the hairs at the back of neck stand on end. There’s streetlight coming in through the window, she can make out the couch, the shape of Eddie under his blanket, and, hovering over him, a looming, amorphous body of liquid darkness. Like something from a childhood nightmare. Like a sleep-paralysis demon crushing his chest. She slaps a hand over her mouth to stifle her gasp, and then her mind catches up with the tidal wave of adrenaline that crashed through her, and she recognizes the oily sheen on the creature’s surface, the low rumble of its voice when it mutters sullenly:</p><p>“You said it’s already weird that they’re letting us stay. And you don’t like lying to Anne.”</p><p>She thought it died. They haven’t talked about it, but she just- she knew about the rocket and the fire. Of course it died, and she hasn’t known how to bring it up with him, whether to express relief or… or condolences. She had Venom living in her body too for a short while, she knew it wasn’t <em>evil</em>, but it had still been… invasive. She had felt guilty about helping the parasite get back to Eddie, even if he did seem… surprisingly okay with it.</p><p>“I know,” Eddie says, voice full of fond exasperation.</p><p>“We <em>know</em> Anne. We like her. She likes us too. She would be happy to know about us.”</p><p>She watches Eddie reach up and run his hand over the black shape of Venom like someone petting a cat, watches the slick surface undulate and ripple against him, somewhere between a body and a second blanket.</p><p>“I’ll tell her next time, okay?”</p><p>“You said that last week too,” Venom rumbles, voice quieter now.</p><p>“I know, love. This time I mean it, I promise.”</p><p>“Sure.”</p><p>Eddie mutters something else, but she can’t make out the words. He turns over onto his side and Venom slips down around his back, she catches a glimpse of teeth, a droplet of a white eye, and then it’s just a shadow again, a sliver of it extending like a limb draped across Eddie’s chest.</p><p>She backs away from the door still holding her breath and heads back upstairs.</p><p> </p><p>“Something wrong?” Dan mumbles when she slips back into bed.</p><p>“No,” she whispers back, curling up against him to soak up his warmth. “Sorry I woke you up.”</p><p>“It’s fine. Were you checking on Eddie?”</p><p>“I just couldn’t sleep.”</p><p>“You’re still worried about him?”</p><p>She hesitates. She has been worried about him. Things have been good, but she knows the dinner parties have been as much for her sake, to let her keep an eye on him, as for they have been for him, to keep him company. He’s been doing fine, but she’s been watching for the cracks.</p><p>Dan slips an arm around her and pulls her closer, and behind her closed eyelids she sees that strange liquid body curling itself protectively around Eddie. In Dan’s sleep-muddled voice she hears the same softness she just heard in the whining of the monster downstairs, in the way Eddie spoke to it when he touched it.</p><p>“Not so much,” she says. “I think… I think he’ll be fine.”</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>